Holiday Cheer 2014ish!

It's been a long holiday season!

Time for our annual Holiday Blog, albeit post New Year’s. Thanks for all the meaningful feedback from last year.  As requested, we’ll keep this brief and to the point, including only what is absolutely essential to keep you up to speed in the Groscost Anthology.  Presenting 12 months of Facebook posts boiled down into one, shortish letter – you’re welcome. 

The Growing Gros-Squatches

For the Grows-Cost kids, 2014 has been none other than a series of remarkable achievements.  For starters: Ruth turned 9 and Si is 11 – no small feat considering it took a whole year for each of them. Their annual physicals revealed both of them continue to plummet in the length and mass stats compared to their less nutrition-oriented counterparts… but we’re not bitter.  We’re set to move them back up toward the middle of the lower pack now that Curt has conceded in his War on Big Sugar.  Yep, we’ve forsaken our “small, but healthy” motto and entered them in the race to Type II diabetes.  We have Wonder Bread and Nutella and we’re not afraid to use it. 

Headgear selfie

Ruth had her annual doctor’s visit and here are the stats – 7 percentile on weight, 7 percentile height.  Weighs 50 pounds and is 50 inches tall.  And just for giggles, her measurements are 23 x 23 x 23.  She is a perfect cube just like her mom, but with a quarter of the displacement. Ruth is in braces and head gear now. Should be out of them before college (if we can afford it now that we missed the sign up deadline for Obamacare).

Si’s birthday party (with 9 of his friends) was a raging success… literally.  That might be the last one of its kind unless we get in close with a drywaller and painter. 



Exploding RuthPaste

We continue to keep the kids enrolled in public schools so they can at least keep pace with the average… at least academically.  Si made a Leprechaun trap for the science fair this year.  Spoiler Alert:  We did NOT catch one.  It wasn’t a design flaw, but those pesky little devils did leave a lot of green tracks around to mock us.  Our kids’ naiveté might be at dangerous levels.  “Exploding Ruthpaste” was another science fair hit worthy of a few hundred YouTube hits, but don’t look for it there.





He's NOT a lineman

Si rarely changes into clean clothes and Ruth changes too often.  Which is ironic since we can’t get him in the shower or her out of it.  So we definitely have 1 boy and 1 girl….  and offsetting clothing and water use practices.



Wait.  Why does “wait” precede every question in our house these days?  If we  had more time to waste, we might actually wait to answer in order to foster patience and maybe get our kids to rethink this rather annoying new trend.



Si had a soccer game cancelled for a tornado…. and his team was ahead…. and the game was in Lakewood, not Kansas.  He is considering coming out of retirement from football and getting back playing – time will tell.  His real love is Parkour however.  Hopefully they’ll need an 11 year old for the next Spiderman movie.

Groscost Parenting Hints, Tips and Tricks

Ruth officially updated the swear-jar rates commensurate with national COLA indices.  The F word gets $5 and the C word 50 cents (she apparently hasn’t been introduced to the real C word so chalk up a victory for the parents on that one).  Good that she recognizes the need to be resourceful for income since allowance still isn’t approved.

Flying the colors in
Canada

To get our kids to interact more openly with strangers, we’ve instituted a “who’s more assertive” competition.  They are rated by mom or dad after such communications.  The system is, of course, objective and completely scientific.  To date they have yet to argue a single rating.  Nothing like a little sibling rivalry to enact behavioral change. 

Curt unwittingly offered Ruth an iPhone if she made it to the State gymnastics competition.  So she did which made a Washington Redskin-giver out of him.  We re-negotiated to 10 Beanie Boos instead.  Little did we know that could cost even more. One month later, she quit gymnastics as abruptly as Russia took over Ukraine, so we feel a bit taken (NOT.  Actually it was more hassle and too much weekend sacrifice for her parents, so we let her think it was her idea – developing empowerment in kids, Parenting 102).

The Animals

The Big Smooth

We put Copper in the ground (electrician’s humor) for Spring cleaning this year.  He left just as our homeowner’s insurance was about to accept him for who he was.  The day we decided it was time to retire his jersey, he couldn’t wait until after the kids left for school.  He threw himself off the back of the couch in a grotesque swan dive seizure – another character building memory for the developing brains.  We preserved his ashes because we like the symbolism, but might have been better served to dress him out for that velvety pelt.



Over the cab in the RV

After three grueling months without a second dog, we reinvested in the canine market.  Rocket (aptly named for… ok nothing, really…  we let the kids pick it), pitched as a Great Dane/Mastiff by the pet rescue, at 7 months, has yet to convince us he’s anything other than a skinny yellow lab.  Not a shred of guard dog in him and will show his belly to anyone with two legs (so he might put up a fight if Pistorius tries to get in).  He is embarrassingly sweet and if you spend time seated at our house you’ll have the sticky knees and elbows to prove it.  He did arrive with some baggage however -  the Ol’ Southern Whipworm which put Rocket on some GI meds and the Groscosts on “Georgia-Ebola” alert.  

Olive and Rocket at work

Olive (our lab/hound blend) now has considerable seniority.  She switched gears with a new puppy around and started breaking out of the fortress.  One fine day (likely in the meat of hunting season – pun emoticon here), we found an elk head in our yard.  The laws of physics prevented it from fitting through the dog door into the house… but it did make it back from who knows where, then under the fence with a respectable rack of antlers (albeit, no longer very well attached).  To reward such admirable work, we updated our mudroom with a heated floor which immediately made the coldest room in the house, the warmest.  The dogs took to it like surfers to pot legalization.



Go Hawks!

We're steadfast in our turf war with the indigenous rodent population. The areas under dispute continue to be the attic and crawlspace (and anywhere they’re seen, heard or otherwise perceived to be). Since they've been denied access, their boundary penetration presence has become more robust.  Mother Nature will provide the next prong of our attack - owl farming.

Groscost’s Hit the Road 




Camping in the repair shop parking lot

Got the motorhome out of the country to see what Canadians charge for repair work for an RV on weekends in a remote village on Vancouver Island.  Turns out – quite a bit.  We did enjoy miles of scenic inside passage up to The Sunshine Coast stopping to “camp” along the way.

Hawaii kid clan

We revisited the 50^th state with close (before we left, that is) friends.  A few of the high and low points – Pearl Harbor, hike up Diamond Head, Waikiki, a few stings from some Man-O-War, swim with dolphins, surf lessons for all without life jackets, beach fun, etc. 

Pre-Man-O-War incident

One notable highlight was an “adventure hike” from Oahu Revealed that documents how to access the Haiku Stairs without the guard catching you.  We snuck by (ignored) him on the way in but he stopped us coming out to admonish us for trespassing.  He didn’t seem to mind that we took a 10-year-old boy in shorts, t-shirt and worn out, slip-on Vans on a hike 2,500 feet up a steep, unmaintained, rusty set of stairs in a monsoon at 4am.  Curt hasn’t received an exact ruling from DSHS on that yet. 




Haiku Hike Crew



We hope you had as wonderful of a 2014 as we did, and we look forward to seeing you in 2015.  Ta ta for now!


Love Always,

Curt, Tracey, Si, Ruthie, Olive and Rocket!